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Vampire Academy (2014) My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on
the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct
Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire
Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if
you added vampires to Heathers, you
would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately
inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from
Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish
leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to
surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young
Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel
storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation
crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like,
hoping…

The Avengers 4.3: The Master Minds The Master Minds hitches
its wagon to the not uncommon Avengers
trope of dark deeds done under the veil of night. We previously encountered it
in The Town of No Return, but Robert
Banks Stewart (best known for Bergerac,
but best known genre-wise for his two Tom Baker Doctor Who stories; likewise, he also penned only two teleplays for
The Avengers) makes this episode more
distinctive, with its mind control and spycraft, while Peter Graham Scott, in
his third contribution to the show on the trot, pulls out all the stops,
particularly with a highly creative climactic fight sequence that avoids the usual
issue of overly-evident stunt doubles.

Paddington 2 (2017)
(SPOILERS) Paddington
2 is every bit as upbeat and well-meaning as its predecessor. It also has more
money thrown at it, a much better villain (an infinitely better villain) and, in terms of plotting, is more
developed, offering greater variety and a more satisfying structure. Additionally,
crucially, it succeeds in offering continued emotional heft and heart to the
Peruvian bear’s further adventures. It isn’t, however, quite as funny.

Even suggesting such a thing sounds curmudgeonly, given the
universal applause greeting the movie, but I say that having revisited the
original a couple of days prior and found myself enjoying it even more than on
first viewing. Writer-director Paul King and co-writer Simon Farnaby introduce
a highly impressive array of set-ups with huge potential to milk their absurdity
to comic ends, but don’t so much squander as frequently leave them undertapped.

Paddington’s succession of odd jobs don’t quite escalate as
uproariously as they migh…

Altered Carbon Season One
(SPOILERS) Well, it looks
good, even if the visuals are absurdly indebted to Blade Runner. Ultimately, though, Altered Carbon is a disappointment. The adaption of Richard
Morgan’s novel comes armed with a string of well-packaged concepts and futuristic
vernacular (sleeves, stacks, cross-sleeves, slagged stacks, Neo-Cs), but
there’s a void at its core. It singularly fails use the dependable detective
story framework to explore the philosophical ramifications of its universe –
except in lip service – a future where death is impermanent, and even botches the
essential goal of creating interesting lead characters (the peripheral ones,
however, are at least more fortunate).

Dreamscape (1984)
(SPOILERS) I wasn’t really au fait with movies’ box office performance until the end of the ‘80s, so I think I had an idea that Dennis Quaid (along with Jeff Bridges) was a much bigger star than he was, just on the basis of the procession of cool movies he showed up in (The Right Stuff, Enemy Mine, Innerspace, D.O.A.) The truth was, the public resisted all attempts to make him The Next Big Thing, not that his sly-grinned, cocky persona throughout the decade would lead you to believe his dogged lack of success had any adverse effect on his mood. Dreamscape was one of his early leading-man roles, and if it’s been largely forgotten, it also inherits a welcome cult status, not only through being pulpy and inventive on a fairly meagre budget, but by being pretty good to boot. It holds up.

The X-Files 11.1: My Struggle III
(SPOILERS) Good grief. Have things become so terminal for Chris Carter
that he has to retcon his own crap from the previous season, rather than the
(what he perceived as) crap written by others? Carter, of course, infamously
pretended the apocalyptic ending of Millennium
Season Two never happened, upset by the path Glen Morgan and James Wong, left
to their own devices, took with his baby. Their episode was one of the greats
of that often-ho-hum series, so the comedown was all the unkinder as a result. In
My Struggle III, at least, Carter’s
rewriting something that wasn’t very good in the first place. Only, he replaces
it with something that is even worse in the second.

Darkest Hour (2017)
(SPOILERS) Watching Joe Wright’s return to the rarefied
plane of prestige – and heritage to boot – filmmaking following the execrable
folly of the panned Pan, I was struck
by the difference an engaged director, one who cares about his characters,
makes to material. Only last week, Ridley Scott’s serviceable All the Money in the World made for a pointed
illustration of strong material in the hands of someone with no such
investment, unless they’re androids. Wright’s dedication to a relatable Winston
Churchill ensures that, for the first hour-plus, Darkest Hour is a first-rate affair, a piece of myth-making that barely
puts a foot wrong. It has that much in common with Wright’s earlier Word War II
tale, Atonement. But then, like Atonement, it comes unstuck.

The X-Files 11.2: This
(SPOILERS) Glen Morgan returns with a really good idea, certainly one
with much more potential than his homelessness tract Home Again in Season 10, but seems to give up on its eerier
implications, and worse has to bash it round the head to fit the season’s
“arc”. Nevertheless, he’s on very comfortable ground with the Mulder-Scully
dynamic in This, who get to spend
almost the entire episode in each other’s company and might be on the best form
here since the show came back, give or take a Darin.

The Shape of Water (2017)
(SPOILERS) The faithful would have you believe it never went
away, but it’s been a good decade since Guillermo del Toro’s mojo was in full
effect, and his output since (or lack thereof: see the torturous wilderness
years of At the Mountains of Madness
and The Hobbit), reflected through
the prism of his peak work Pan’s
Labyrinth, bears the hallmarks of a serious qualitative tumble. He put his
name to stinker TV show The Strain,
returned to movies with the soulless Pacific
Rim and fashioned flashy but empty gothic romance Crimson Peak (together his weakest pictures, and I’m not forgetting
Mimic). The Shape of Water only seems to underline what everyone has been
saying for years, albeit previously confined to his Spanish language pictures: that
the smaller and more personal they are, the better. If his latest is at times a
little too wilfully idiosyncratic,
it’s also a movie where you can nevertheless witness it’s creator’s creativity
flowing untrammelled once mo…

Split (2016) (SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based
filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of
only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several
of his pictures, including his last, The
Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low
budget horror arena. Split continues
that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to
bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically
uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t
always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage
girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best
intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes
and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the
end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…